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WHY'D I WATCH IT?
It's October, I've been playing Dead by Daylight against my better judgment, and I've never seen the granddaddy of slasher movies. Might as well. All I know is Michael Myers is a slow-moving stabby killer with an obsession with Laurie Strode for some reason.
WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
There seem to be two types of John Carpenter movies; the first type are campy fun (The Thing, In The Mouth of Madness), and the second type are astonishingly bad (Dark Star, Big Trouble in Little China). Halloween is the latter of those two types of movies.
For movie that is often credited as pioneering the modern horror genre, I suppose I really shouldn't be too surprised it's awful, but I expected a bit more than this!
Right away Halloween makes a disasterously awful first impression with it's opening """scare""", wherein we see a young Austin Powers dress up as a clown, grab a knife, put on a mask, and stab his mom in a fashion so insultingly unrealistic that it screams parody.
The camera is from his perspective, and when he puts the mask on we can only see through the eyeholes, we can see the knife never goes near his mom, his arm just smoothly waves back and forth completely betraying any "stabbing" going on, and to make it extra hilariously stupid, in case you were a rational human being and didn't quite get what this awful effect was trying to accomplish, Michael even turns his gaze up and to the right so that the motion of his hand with the knife going up and down is clearly in shot.
Cause you know, Michael's a special little boy, sometimes he forgets where he is and needs to look at what his body is doing sometimes to figure it out. OH I'M STABBING SOMEBODY, WOW OKAY, I THOUGHT SOMETHING WAS KINDA WEIRD. WELP, MIGHT AS WELL GO WITH THE FLOW, SORRY MOM!
Fastforward 15 years as Michael is presumed to be in a "high-security" mental hospital which he casually escapes from because the staff apparently let the patients out into the rain at night with only chest-high fences to keep them on the property. Michael magics himself onto the hood of a car in a feat of athleticism that will not be demonstrated at any other point in the movie.
Dagnabbit! Michael Myers is free! Someone stop that definitely psychotic child we didn't develop any character for!
Michael goes home, and Laurie Strode wanders up to the house because of some plot point we'll never revisit and BOOM, Shrek is obsessed. He then proceeds to stalk Laurie well beyond the point she should be contacting the police, but of course she never does cause she's a dumb**** kid and definitely not an adult Jamie Lee Curtis failing to pull off looking and acting younger than she actually is.
Over half the movie passes and all of **** all happens. Michael persistently stalks Laurie until he randomly takes offense to one of the lamest "jokes" ever to be referred to as a "joke" in a movie and starts stalking Laurie's friend.
He dickteases this kill across multiple scenes until finally Laurie's friend hooks up with a guy and naturally because this is a slasher movie, they have to have sex, so that the liberals in the audience can see **** and the conservatives in the audience can have the satisfaction of seeing liberals die.
The sex is incredibly fake too, there isn't even any thrusting, just two people squirming on each other until the dude rolls over revealing there was a healthy amount of bedsheet between them the whole time.
Dude walks away, is lured to an open door, pokes around and gets jumped by Myers who chokes him, lifts him into the air, and stabs him in the stomach.
...then the camera switches to a wide shot and I lost my shit because he's apparently suspended in the air by a butcher knife that plainly cannot pass through his entire body, let alone enough to pierce the closet behind him and suspend his entire body weight.
Myers strangles the girlfriend, and at about this time, the Doctor, whose car Myers stole, realizes his car has been sitting across the street from him for what seems like several hours he's been standing outside Myers' home.
All the while this guy is apparently just standing out on the street, Laurie crosses the street, apparently never even crossing paths with him, and investigates her friend's house. She also never turns on any lights. Multiple characters conveniently ignore the lightswitches on the walls in multiple scenes.
Eventually she finds the bodies of her friends, gets jumped by Myers and runs out of the house, finally aware she's in danger... and proceeds to run to the house immediately next door.
When they don't open, she runs back across the street, notices she somehow lost her keys, and decides to shriek at the kid she's babysitting to come downstairs and unlock the door... as Myers is casually pacing toward her.
Laurie has an awful lot more time in these scenes to do what she does than would realistically have if Myers didn't stand around and take his sweet-ass time getting everywhere.
He chases her up to the kid's room where Laurie proceeds to run into the closet and bind close the door, rather than do literally anything to the BEDROOM DOOR WHICH ALSO CONTAINS THE KIDS. How do you **** up that bad?
Of course, Michael can break through that shit, so he does, Laurie pokes him in the eye with a hangar, he drops one of several knives he pulls out of his ass offscreen and she stabs him in the chest.
GOOD, he's dead. Or is he? We've seen him get up after being knocked down before. Oh well, Laurie, why don't you just throw that knife on the ground within arm's reach of him and turn your back? You weren't a dumb enough character already.
Of course he gets back up, the Doctor conveniently shows up last second with barely any justification, shoots him several times and he's dead.
Disappears offscreen for sequelbait and Laurie breaks character to utter the most embarrassing line in the script: "It was the bogeyman."
What an awful movie. Nothing supernatural is ever established in this movie, so we're supposed to believe that Michael took a large knitting needle to the neck, hangar wire to the eyes, a butcher knife to the chest, 3 gunshots center-mass, AND fell off two-story balcony and still manage to run away when his average top speed is walking pace.
I simply cannot watch this movie as anything but a movie because everything from Curtis looking too old, to the kills looking faker than the stupid shit I put in my high school video editing projects totally divorces me from any immersion.
It's also just not scary, if you care about that sort of thing. Which I don't.
But apparently someone did because this became a massive movie franchise for no conceivable reason I can think of. Nothing this movie did was innovative or interesting other than presenting the killer as something other than a monster-of-the-week, which isn't exactly new. Is it cause it's set in the suburbs?? Were moviegoers so sheltered that that's what pushed it over the edge? Home invasion??
Wikipedia says this movie was inspired by Psycho. What exactly did Psycho do that persuaded John Carpenter to make this? Ambiguously wave a butcher knife at a naked lady until they """die"""?
Reading Roger Ebert's review of this movie is utterly baffling with the benefit of 40 years of hindsight.
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/halloween-1979
This movie was obviously bad, but it wasn't really funny bad or even frustratingly bad, just boring bad. The only good thing about it is it's theme which quickly becomes repetitive, albeit not to the same extreme as Platoon, which is an infinitely scarier prospect than anything in this movie.
Final Verdict: [Just... Bad]
Halloween
Horror Slasher / English / 1978
Horror Slasher / English / 1978
WHY'D I WATCH IT?
It's October, I've been playing Dead by Daylight against my better judgment, and I've never seen the granddaddy of slasher movies. Might as well. All I know is Michael Myers is a slow-moving stabby killer with an obsession with Laurie Strode for some reason.
WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
“It was the bogeyman.”
There seem to be two types of John Carpenter movies; the first type are campy fun (The Thing, In The Mouth of Madness), and the second type are astonishingly bad (Dark Star, Big Trouble in Little China). Halloween is the latter of those two types of movies.
For movie that is often credited as pioneering the modern horror genre, I suppose I really shouldn't be too surprised it's awful, but I expected a bit more than this!
Right away Halloween makes a disasterously awful first impression with it's opening """scare""", wherein we see a young Austin Powers dress up as a clown, grab a knife, put on a mask, and stab his mom in a fashion so insultingly unrealistic that it screams parody.
The camera is from his perspective, and when he puts the mask on we can only see through the eyeholes, we can see the knife never goes near his mom, his arm just smoothly waves back and forth completely betraying any "stabbing" going on, and to make it extra hilariously stupid, in case you were a rational human being and didn't quite get what this awful effect was trying to accomplish, Michael even turns his gaze up and to the right so that the motion of his hand with the knife going up and down is clearly in shot.
Cause you know, Michael's a special little boy, sometimes he forgets where he is and needs to look at what his body is doing sometimes to figure it out. OH I'M STABBING SOMEBODY, WOW OKAY, I THOUGHT SOMETHING WAS KINDA WEIRD. WELP, MIGHT AS WELL GO WITH THE FLOW, SORRY MOM!
Fastforward 15 years as Michael is presumed to be in a "high-security" mental hospital which he casually escapes from because the staff apparently let the patients out into the rain at night with only chest-high fences to keep them on the property. Michael magics himself onto the hood of a car in a feat of athleticism that will not be demonstrated at any other point in the movie.
Dagnabbit! Michael Myers is free! Someone stop that definitely psychotic child we didn't develop any character for!
Michael goes home, and Laurie Strode wanders up to the house because of some plot point we'll never revisit and BOOM, Shrek is obsessed. He then proceeds to stalk Laurie well beyond the point she should be contacting the police, but of course she never does cause she's a dumb**** kid and definitely not an adult Jamie Lee Curtis failing to pull off looking and acting younger than she actually is.
Over half the movie passes and all of **** all happens. Michael persistently stalks Laurie until he randomly takes offense to one of the lamest "jokes" ever to be referred to as a "joke" in a movie and starts stalking Laurie's friend.
He dickteases this kill across multiple scenes until finally Laurie's friend hooks up with a guy and naturally because this is a slasher movie, they have to have sex, so that the liberals in the audience can see **** and the conservatives in the audience can have the satisfaction of seeing liberals die.
The sex is incredibly fake too, there isn't even any thrusting, just two people squirming on each other until the dude rolls over revealing there was a healthy amount of bedsheet between them the whole time.
Dude walks away, is lured to an open door, pokes around and gets jumped by Myers who chokes him, lifts him into the air, and stabs him in the stomach.
...then the camera switches to a wide shot and I lost my shit because he's apparently suspended in the air by a butcher knife that plainly cannot pass through his entire body, let alone enough to pierce the closet behind him and suspend his entire body weight.
Myers strangles the girlfriend, and at about this time, the Doctor, whose car Myers stole, realizes his car has been sitting across the street from him for what seems like several hours he's been standing outside Myers' home.
All the while this guy is apparently just standing out on the street, Laurie crosses the street, apparently never even crossing paths with him, and investigates her friend's house. She also never turns on any lights. Multiple characters conveniently ignore the lightswitches on the walls in multiple scenes.
Eventually she finds the bodies of her friends, gets jumped by Myers and runs out of the house, finally aware she's in danger... and proceeds to run to the house immediately next door.
When they don't open, she runs back across the street, notices she somehow lost her keys, and decides to shriek at the kid she's babysitting to come downstairs and unlock the door... as Myers is casually pacing toward her.
Laurie has an awful lot more time in these scenes to do what she does than would realistically have if Myers didn't stand around and take his sweet-ass time getting everywhere.
He chases her up to the kid's room where Laurie proceeds to run into the closet and bind close the door, rather than do literally anything to the BEDROOM DOOR WHICH ALSO CONTAINS THE KIDS. How do you **** up that bad?
Of course, Michael can break through that shit, so he does, Laurie pokes him in the eye with a hangar, he drops one of several knives he pulls out of his ass offscreen and she stabs him in the chest.
GOOD, he's dead. Or is he? We've seen him get up after being knocked down before. Oh well, Laurie, why don't you just throw that knife on the ground within arm's reach of him and turn your back? You weren't a dumb enough character already.
Of course he gets back up, the Doctor conveniently shows up last second with barely any justification, shoots him several times and he's dead.
O R I S H E ? ? ?
Disappears offscreen for sequelbait and Laurie breaks character to utter the most embarrassing line in the script: "It was the bogeyman."
What an awful movie. Nothing supernatural is ever established in this movie, so we're supposed to believe that Michael took a large knitting needle to the neck, hangar wire to the eyes, a butcher knife to the chest, 3 gunshots center-mass, AND fell off two-story balcony and still manage to run away when his average top speed is walking pace.
I simply cannot watch this movie as anything but a movie because everything from Curtis looking too old, to the kills looking faker than the stupid shit I put in my high school video editing projects totally divorces me from any immersion.
It's also just not scary, if you care about that sort of thing. Which I don't.
But apparently someone did because this became a massive movie franchise for no conceivable reason I can think of. Nothing this movie did was innovative or interesting other than presenting the killer as something other than a monster-of-the-week, which isn't exactly new. Is it cause it's set in the suburbs?? Were moviegoers so sheltered that that's what pushed it over the edge? Home invasion??
Wikipedia says this movie was inspired by Psycho. What exactly did Psycho do that persuaded John Carpenter to make this? Ambiguously wave a butcher knife at a naked lady until they """die"""?
Reading Roger Ebert's review of this movie is utterly baffling with the benefit of 40 years of hindsight.
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/halloween-1979
This movie was obviously bad, but it wasn't really funny bad or even frustratingly bad, just boring bad. The only good thing about it is it's theme which quickly becomes repetitive, albeit not to the same extreme as Platoon, which is an infinitely scarier prospect than anything in this movie.
Final Verdict: [Just... Bad]